Best Drupal Hosting

As a web agency with a LOT of hosting accounts (we have countless side-projects and like to experiment), we’ve got a pretty good idea of what defines a great web host. These are our best Drupal hosting providers, true quality hosting without breaking the bank.

Best Drupal Hosting 2020 Reviews

1. SiteGround

In our opinion, the best Drupal hosting is SiteGround. Known for its global standards, SiteGround offers its users the following hosting options:

Shared hosting

WordPress hosting

Cloud hosting

Dedicated servers

You can choose from three shared hosting plans (pick the one that’s most suitable for you):

Startup – Its features include the following:

1 website

10GB storage space

10,000 visits/ month

GrowBig – This plan carries the following features:

Unlimited websites

20GB storage space

25,000 visits/ month

GoGeek – You can get these with this plan:

Unlimited websites

30GB storage space

100,000 visits/ month

Note that you’ll get more features and freebies with higher-priced plans. However, you can always start with any of the cheaper plans as you can upgrade your plan any time you want.

Reliability: SiteGround guarantees their uptime to be 99.99% – and they can really deliver on this promise. In fact, their terms of service even indicate that failure to deliver on their part will render them accountable to their users. It’s actually one of the reasons why customers like them (and their service).

Speed: SiteGround is equipped with powerful servers – therefore, your website/s will always have fast loading times. Site speed is also one of the factors considered in SEO – so, choosing SiteGround as your web hosting provider will surely boost your SEO effort.

Support: You’ll be glad to know that SiteGround customer support offers 24/7 live chat, phone, and ticketing system (via email).

Pros:

2. HostGator

Founded in 2002, HostGator is one of the most popular hosting providers today. They offer the following hosting services to their customers:

Shared hosting

VPS hosting

Dedicated hosting

Cloud hosting

WordPress hosting

What we like about their Shared hosting plans, is that they all come with unlimited storage and bandwidth. The only main difference in their features is the number of websites you can host (see reference below):

Hatchling plan – 1 website

Baby plan – unlimited websites

Business – unlimited websites (suitable for businesses and e-commerce platforms)

Reliability: HostGator gives their customers 99.9% uptime guarantee – and they can make good on their promise most of the time. So, you can expect to encounter fewer problems with downtimes when you choose to go for HostGator.

Speed: With one of the best servers out there, expect high response time when people access your HostGator website/s.

Support: HostGator offers its users 24/7 support via live chat, phone, and email. They actually have one of the best customer support today.

As you can see in their shared hosting plans, each one has unlimited storage and bandwidth – which is good (as even their cheapest plan gets these awesome features). Keep in mind, however, that their higher-priced plans are faster and more feature-filled.

Reliability: A2 Hosting offers its users 99.9% uptime guarantee. Fortunately, a lot of their customers are satisfied with their product (and promise). Small businesses will especially find their features useful.

Speed: Because of their Cloudfare integration, web pages built on A2 Hosting are fast-loading (even with large images and files on their pages).

Support: A2 Hosting provides its users with 24/7 support via live chat. You can also contact their support team (including billing and technical) by phone and email. And they also have an extensive number of help articles in their database.

We like that their cheapest plan allows for 2 websites (the cheapest hosting plans usually come with only 1 website). However, if you want to get a package with unlimited everything, you should pick their top of the line plan (Pro).

Reliability: InMotion guarantees their customers 99.9% uptime – and we’ve found very few complaints with regards to this.

Cons:

Drupal hosting: How To Find The Best One!

It’s important to choose a good Drupal hosting Company for your website to minimize problems involving downtimes, server issues, and more. This way, you can focus more on growing your site or business. In this post, we’ll tell you all the important things to look for when getting a hosting package.

Server Location

If possible, choose a hosting provider for your Magento site with servers that are located in your country. If not, go for one that includes a CDN (Content Distribution Network) service in their hosting package. The CDN works as a storage system for the cached version of your website. This is then distributed to nearby networks of servers in relation to your site visitors’ locations. CDNs optimize load times – which is important for pleasant visitor experience and SEO as well.

While you can pay for CDN services, you can also look for hosting companies that provide this service. If you see CloudFlare included in their subscription plans, that’s a type of CDN and it’s usually free. All you need to do is set it up in your control panel to make it work.

Server Uptime

Your hosting provider’s uptime speaks of its overall reliability – that’s why we are recommending going for one with around 99.9% guaranteed uptime. If it’s lower than that, you can expect a lot of downtimes (and losses).

Ask Google for specific Companies’ uptime figures and compare the results. The actual figures of each Company’s uptime will give you an idea as to their overall performance (and your site’s would-be performance as well).

SSL Certificates

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and it represents site security. As you may very well know, data can be stolen (such as your site visitors’ personal information). When you have an SSL certificate, all the data between your site’s servers and visitors will be encrypted.

Sites with SSL certificates include an “s” in their site address. So, instead of just http, you’ll see https. Note that SSL certificates have become very important to site users. In fact, it’s also very important to Google now – so important, that it’s now one of the ranking factors for SEO.

Luckily, a lot of hosting providers now include free SSL certificates. This can cost you an additional $10 or so a year if it’s not included in the plan.

Speed

Speed is indeed a very important feature for obvious reasons. In fact, it’s the reason why we included server location and CDN in the list of things to look out for (these are both contributory to your site’s speed).

Still, you can keep your eyes open for other offerings from your chosen host provider. If they’re giving you more CPU resources, that’s good. And if they have custom scripts especially made for Drupal websites, that’s even better. Both of those extra features can further boost your site speed.

Disk Space

Don’t be overly impressed with large disk spaces (there are hosting providers that offer unlimited spaces on even their cheapest plans). The truth is, you won’t even need a lot of disk space if you’re just running blogs and businesses on the internet (yes, even if they’re big). Only e-commerce stores really need A LOT of storage space (in this case, you can consider going for those with unlimited spaces).

At this point, we’d like to warn you with regards to getting hosting packages just because you’re attracted to their unlimited storage space feature. More often than not, those that offer this feature cheaply come with MANY issues. So, if you want to avoid those issues, don’t go for very cheap (and free) hosting packages for your Drupal site.

Bandwidth and Data Transfer

Bandwidth and data transfer are both important features in choosing your Drupal hosting provider as they embody the rate of information transfer on your website. These are particularly the points to look out for if you intend to have large files downloaded from your site (such as PDFs, videos, etc.) Large files eat a lot of bandwidth, so you should be prepared for that.

Customer Support

How important is customer support in a hosting provider? It’s very, very important. Go for a hosting Company that offers 24/7 customer support just in case you’ll need some help at any time of the day. Having phone and live chat support are particularly important as not having someone to help you when you really need it can be very frustrating.

Drupal: The Details

For optimal scalability and flexibility in design, Drupal is unbeatable. Drupal is a content management system (CMS) used by many websites that attract high-volumes. From government and university websites to major e-commerce retailers, Drupal is the backend framework behind some of the largest sites and is used by 2.2 of all websites worldwide. Read on to learn more about the best Drupal hosting solutions for the CMS.

What is Drupal?

In its most basic sense, Drupal is a content management system (CMS). As a CMS, it allows website owners to create their website, including text, images, videos, and more. Unlike other CMSs, however, such as WordPress, Drupal is not limited to a blog or e-commerce format, and there are no restrictions for how much a website can grow. It has many expansive capabilities for scaling up and extensive customizable features. Best of all, it is an open source software that is free for the public to use, download or share with other website designers.

Drupal has been described as a content management framework, meaning that it can perform all the basic functions of a content management system and more. While it has the basic features of any CMS—including administration systems, maintenance privileges, user account registration, menu management, customizable page layout, RSS feeds, taxonomy, etc—it can be used to design more than a basic website. Drupal can be used to develop websites, blogs, forums, and community-sites constituted by user-generated content.

Drupal is considered to be incredibly flexible. With just one install, it can run numerous and diverse scripts, and although it was not developed for web applications, there are websites that use the CMS for just that purpose.

Who can use Drupal?

Drupal is best for sites that are expected to grow or to attract high volumes of customers. To put scale and volume in perspective, consider that the CMS is used to manage the sites of many major corporations, media agencies, and government entities, including eBay, Sony Music, Al Jazeera, BBC, NBC, Amnesty International, Harvard University, and the White House.

Because of its high level of flexibility, the CMS is ideal for website owners who want to customize websites exactly as they want. From unlimited design capabilities, to enhanced accessibility features that make it easier to optimize site access for various users, including users with disabilities, Drupal can be modified to meet the needs of any website.

History

Launched as an open source project in 2001, Drupal was developed by Dries Buytaert. The name is an Anglicized form of the Dutch “druppel,” which means “droplet.”

Since its inception, the reach of Drupal has grown exponentially, and more than 1,180,000 sites worldwide use it for their CMS needs.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

Easy install—the best Drupal hosting can be installed with one-click

Open source software—it’s free to install and use! There are no licensing fees.

Flexible—One of the main reasons website owners love Drupal is because it has unlimited design and structure capabilities, and if you know how to code, it is very flexible.

Scalability—it is a CMS that can grow with the website and handle huge amounts of content

Versatility—optional modules can be added or enabled to modify and enhance a website’s functionality

Accessibility—the release of Drupal 7 made it easier to improve website accessibility for both administrators and website visitors. As pointed out on their website, Drupal’s accessibility features make it the preferred CMS for developing sites for people with disabilities.

Modular core—the modular core means that administrators can modify or override the default features without disrupting the core. Contributed modules, or plug-ins, can be added to provide alternative or additional features. Currently, more than 36,500 modules are available for free.

Extensive themes—in January 2017, there were more than 2400 available themes.

Distributions—This is the term that Drupal uses for bundles or packages that are designed for websites or applications with a specific purpose, such as “news” or “e-commerce.” The distribution packages are like starter kits and come with numerous themes, modules, and configuration settings.

Localization—Drupal is available in 100 languages and can support right-to-left languages.

Cons:

Learning curve—Although the basic installation and administration does not require knowledge of programming, for higher level functions, you’ll need a PHP specialist or have advanced coding knowledge for higher-level functions.

Too many options—The extensive availability of modules is overwhelming for many administrators, and the modules are not well organized. There are also instances where some modules are incomplete or outdated.

Updates can cause incompatibility—Large-scale updates may render themes and modules incompatible because Drupal does not provide backward compatibility, or compatibility for older versions of the software. The data in older versions is still usable, but developers may need to modify the existing code to maintain compatibility.

Searching functionality needs improvement—the search functionality on Drupal sites often is ineffective. There are modules available that improve the search functionality, but these are often difficult to locate and/or implement.

Security concerns—A large hack in October 2014 due to an SQL injection bug affected thousands of Drupal sites and created a backdoor that could not be eliminated or fixed. Although the code vulnerability that allowed the hack to happen was identified and the system strengthened to prevent it from happening again, some administrators are still wary of the CMS because of the incident.

System Requirements

Drupal was originally developed to operate on the LAMP stack platform. The LAMP stack is a web platform comprised of four open-source systems: Linux (operating system), Apache (HTTP Server) MySQL (a relational database management system), and PHP (programming language). As a stack of systems that work in concert with each other, the LAMP stack is optimal for developing dynamic websites.

Beginning with version 7, it became possible to run Drupal on the Windows Internet Information Services (IIS) web server. There is a special group dedicated to installation and issues related to Windows. In addition to Windows IIS, the CMS also can be configured with a Nginx web server.

For website owners without a web hosting account, it is possible to try out select services at Drupal Gardens. The Gardens are a place for exploring some of the possibilities of the CMS and as such, it does not allow users to upload themes and modules or to import sites. To access these advanced features, it is recommended to set up a web hosting account and create a Drupal site.

FAQs

What kinds of sites can Drupal be used to build?

Because of its flexibility and scalability, Drupal can be used to a wide variety of sites, from blogs and portfolios to sites for e-commerce, governments, universities, small and global businesses, social networks, media, and even project management. Admins can build sites that are entirely unique or, if developing a site within a particular niche, they can select from dozens of Drupal distributions, which are bundles loaded with modules, themes, and configurations responsive to a particular market.

Is Drupal easy to use?

For installation and content management in the backend, Drupal is easy to use and does not require knowledge of coding. However, initially building a site can be challenging, for both novices and experts. There is a steep learning curve, but once the usability hurdles are overcome, it is a powerful tool that is flexible, secure, and speedy.

What are distributions?

Distributions are Drupal’s term for software bundles that come loaded with a variety of modules, configurations, themes and other features for websites in a specific market. Distributions include packages for media outlets, governments, hospitals, education, NGOs, churches, etc.

What are modules?

Modules are plug-ins or programs that can be added to the Drupal core to enable additional features. Drupal has over 35,000 modules, which can be used to enhance technical, functional or presentational features.

Are the themes customizable?

Drupal does not support specific types of content over others, so the themes are fully customizable. Customization includes changing the layout, colors, and overall website appearance, but it also includes modification of website functionalities like RSS feeds.

How easy is it to install Drupal?

There are numerous hosting plans that allow for one-click installation. To use Drupal distributions, however, manual installation is typically required.

What are the hosting requirements?

Drupal is written in PHP and currently uses PHP 5.2+. The CMS works best with the web servers Apache, Windows IIS, or Nginx. It is compatible with MySQL databases, as well as PostgreSQL databases.

Can Drupal be used with shared hosting?

Technically speaking, Drupal can work with shared hosting, and for exploring the basics and experimenting with the system, shared hosting is adequate. However, for sites that have high volume and large amounts of content, it is better to sign up for a dedicated server or a VPS.

Are there any other hosting requirements?

Some of the hosting requirements depend on if certain Drupal distributions are being used. Some distributions have specific hosting requirements, and these are specified in the package.